What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

People write us the most amazing things.

I’ve thought about starting a “Dear Sally” column where some of what people write can be shared with others. It might give courage and inspiration. I’m tempted to jump into this because it would be fun and inspiring for me too. But right now I just don’t have the time to stay on top of such a column. Perhaps in the future, when more of the administrative tasks are out of my inbox, when the tours are complete, when someone comes along to fund administrative staff, or when DVD sales soar to such a point that we can support another staff member, then I would love to do such a thing.

For now I will just share one woman’s experience, and my response:

Dear Kathy,

Your email is, of course, quite touching to read, as are so many that we receive.

I’ll respond, back and forth, below:

Hi Sally,
Thank you and Timothy so much for making this film.

Thank you, in return, for resonating with the message, the work, the longing to help, to have an impact.

I have a small story of my own to tell. Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly frustrated with what seems are my own paltry and insignificant efforts to contribute to the saving of the planet. I have tried many ways (prayer, consulting the trees, consulting ancestors, therapy, begging, pleading to anyone and/or anything) to discern what my role should be.

But all I have heard is silence…

My heart resonates with all of those expressions of your longing to find your work. And, for myself, all of those expressions of heartfelt longing to help, to be of service, have been important pieces even in the absence of clear answers.

….that is until I saw your movie. The night after watching it, I tossed and turned until finally at about 4:00a.m. Then an idea emerged. I am going to send 50 copies to people I know and ask that they, if inspired and so inclined, will “pay it forward” and send it to 3 other people and request the same of their receivers. I hope they will purchase an additional 2 copies to keep it circulating at a fast pace. I know this is still a very small step, but I have a lot of energy around it so I am going to assume that it is my inner voice telling me to act.

This is the way that widespread changes often happen. Are you familiar with The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? It’s a very compelling book. Often apparently small actions can create huge changes. He details many examples of that happening. So I would invite you not to discount such an action. Your action, may set into motion, in ways you may or may not see, some other chain of events that does immeasurable good.

I was once in a workshop of Christian activists and heard: “We are called only to be faithful, not necessarily successful.” This is very much the spirit with which Tim and I are acting. We can’t know if our efforts will create the change out there, in the world, in the widespread way that we long for. What we know is that, having placed our picket pins, having decided we must show up with the truth we’ve been given, the change has occurred in us. We have taken our place in the story of The Great Turning. We will show up and do our best. That is all we can do, and it must be sufficient, whether it is successful or not.

Your film is so powerful. I don’t see how anyone could view it and not break out of denial and be moved to act.

Well, believe it or not, people do view it and manage to stay in denial. The wounds of Empire are deep and people are understandably numb, cynical and afraid to feel. But there are also lots of people who view it, and view it again, and again, because they don’t want to be in denial. They want to be awake and in action. They want to step into a larger, more meaningful story than that of Empire. Sometimes these are people who one might not expect. Sometimes people we would expect to feel supported and empowered by our film are instead threatened and angry, because we are not selling easy, hopeful, and only slightly inconvenient answers. It is heartening, though, how many people we hear from who are deeply appreciative. Like you, having seen the movie, they feel supported, empowered and affirmed in the midst of the mainstream culture that says they must be crazy to be so concerned.

In the dialogue circles we facilitate after screenings the conversation is sober, thoughtful, and seems, at times, to touch into the sacred, in spite of the fact the circles often only last an hour or an hour and a half. It would be great if such circles could be available following every viewing. It seems like usually about half of the people who attend stay for the dialogue.

There are, no doubt, many reasons for people leaving. Some of them likely disagree with the information and/or analysis, or flat out wish to remain in denial. Some perhaps feel so deeply moved and vulnerable that they are not ready to sit in a circle of strangers. Some may leave simply because they had other commitments to attend to. The people who stay, though, are largely people who long for connection and for the company of others who are also willing to sit with the information, to sit with the fact that there are not quick, easy, painless answers, that there aren’t authorities “out there” who will come up with solutions, that, in the words of the Hopi elder, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So, as you take this action, please feel free to refer people to our website, to our blogs and comments to the blogs especially, because that can be a place where people can get additional support, in the absence of a dialogue circle in person. As insufficient as it is to connect via this electronic media, it is something, and may be a helpful adjunct to the movie.

I plan to keep a tracking record to see how many people actually see it as a result of this small step. I’ll keep you posted if interested.

Please do, absolutely, keep us posted.

Thanks again,

Kathy

Our very best regards,
Sally

Old Marley was as dead as a door nail… This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

First published Christmas 2008, if memory serves.

I did something the other day that I haven’t done for a long time. Something I used to do often. Something unexpected: I went to a mall. It was a small mall. An old mall. A sad little mall that has not kept up with the times. But it was a mall nonetheless. And I went into it. I was not shopping for Christmas presents. (Being neither Christian nor Consumerist, nor, for that matter, Humanist, I don’t really do Christmas.) Nor was I sneaking a Cinnabon™. (This mall doesn’t have a single purveyor of Extreme Carbohydrates…)

What I was doing was looking for a bathroom.

You may, at this point, be expecting some sort of a rant. Based solely on a statistical analysis of my past behavior, that expectation would be reasonable. I have, in deed and in fact, done my share of ranting. So for me to start raving at this point about consumerism, or the holidays, or the global industrial death-machine responsible for everything I saw around me, for me to start fuming about how the destruction of the life of this planet was reflected in every sparkling ornament on the twenty foot Xmas tree at the mall’s center, would be the most normal and natural thing for me to do. I have now become, after all, a very minor public figure on the eco-ranting scene. It’s my job, right? It’s what I do.

But as I walked around the mall, I noticed a most curious thing: I did not feel angry. I was not filled with righteous indignation and steely resolve. I felt neither assaulted nor insulted. My inner conversation was not laced with snide comments and scathing judgments. My blood was not boiling. I was neither irate, mad, annoyed, cross, vexed, irritated, indignant, irked, furious, enraged, infuriated, in a temper, incensed, raging, fuming, seething, beside oneself, choleric, outraged, livid, apoplectic, hot under the collar, up in arms, in high dudgeon, foaming at the mouth, doing a slow burn, steamed up, in a lather, fit to be tied, seeing red, sore, bent out of shape, ticked off, teed off, nor PO’d. I was, in fact, feeling pretty much the last thing one would expect of me in this situation: I was feeling both humbled and… drum roll please… a bit of hope.

Go figure. That’s what happens when I really gotta pee. I go a bit crazy.

Humbled? Whatever for? Aren’t these the people, and the beliefs and behaviors, and the corporations, which are happily engaged in consuming the planet? Well… yeah. But as I looked around at those desperate shops, their tinsel-splattered storefronts smiling maniacally with invitation, as I watched my fellow mallers bumping around in search of, as I listened to the holiday music struggling frantically to convince me - on a day in mid-December that topped out at 78 degrees Frighteninglyhigh, in a drought-stricken corner of the world so dry now that FEMA is starting to erect mobile home cities for the fish, at a time when it looks like the only gift we’re going to get from our Uncle Sam in Bali is a train load of coal in our stockings, as I listened still to that holiday music trying frantically to convince me that it IS beginning to look a lot like Christmas, goddamnit, what became crystal clear was that, not that many years ago, I was one of those people, shopping those shops and singing those songs. Not that many years ago, I, me, Tim Bennett, was just the sort of person I might now harshly judge as clueless or befuddled, or even willfully ignorant. Not that many years ago I was cruising the malls, buying gifts for my kids, living the American Dream, a Chick-Fil-A™ in one hand and an Orange Julius™ in the other, shopping til dropping before donning my nightcap and settling my brain for a long winter’s denial.

I’m cringing. Can you feel me cringing?

Not at who I was. Not at who those mallers still are. I’m cringing at the realization of how easy it has been and still is for me to judge people for being where I was not that long ago. When it comes to myself, I’ve got lots of compassion. I was born into an insane culture. I was shaped and pressured and forced and guided and wounded and altered and thwarted and numbed and hoodwinked and lied to and ripped off. When it comes to everybody else… well, it’s guilty until proven innocent, with me as both judge and jury. With the legendary intensity of a reformed smoker, I’ve stomped through the world, handing out condemnations and sentences like so many business cards: Tim Bennett… Reformed Civilized Person… Call me for all your Anger and Judgment needs! I mean… it’s the end of the world as we know it, people! Wake the fuck up!

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

I remember, back in college, saying to my now-ex as we sat in the student lounge, “On the whole, I don’t much like human beings.” Those words have stuck with me since. Not just a sentence, but also a sentence, with little chance of parole. While now and again I might find an individual who passes muster, the bewildered herd I met along “the crowded paths of life” was a disappointing and disgusting lot, and I saw little to do but keep my distance. Call me a walk-in, a changeling, or just an arrogant asshole, I was not one of them. I was not from around here. ”I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.”

And there I stood in the mall… and I saw… I saw!… I was one of them, and always had been. Forty nine years previous, on a drunk or a dare, I’d tripped and fallen - or jumped - into the gravity well called Earth and was now stumbling about, stunned and disoriented, a spark of life and energy encased in a bipedal meat-bag, surrounded by hundreds- thousands- millions- billions of fellow sparks-in-meat-bags, all wondering what the hell is going on and who’s in charge and hey has anybody seen the instruction manual?

I’m from around here after all.

Bah! Humbled!

Which brings me to hope.

People who know me well know that I have a bit of a speech impediment: whenever I try to say the word “hope” it comes out sounding slightly off, like a Brit doing an American accent, but not doing it very well. It’s not that I have anything against hope, at least as a noun. I’m as much a fan of possibility as the next guy, and my sense of the universe is that there is always possibility, even in the darkest days. But I’m highly attuned to the dangers and downsides of hope, and so often defend against hope when I see it being abused or misused, and avoid the word when I can, attempting to steer clear of that misuse.

Yes, there is always possibility. But there are also laws of physics and chemistry and biology, and there are limits to science and technology. And there is also cultural inertia and psychosocial wounding. And there are also huge forces at work in the world, with plans and intentions of their own. And so we must balance possibility with inevitability, vision with current reality, and surrender to the unknown, and come to see that many of our hopes are false, and that some of those possibilities we - our sparks, not our meat-bags - do not even want.

And as for hoping as a verb…. well, let’s just say that I am learning to keep my own power for myself, and that that feels really, really good. Read Derrick Jensen’s essay Beyond Hope and you’ll understand what I mean. The language of hoping can rob us of our power.

In the mall, what I saw was a possibility. Think of it. Not that many years ago I was a maller and now I’m working full-time for the planet and jonesing for “the end of Empire” and the collapse of the system that is killing everything. And I’m not alone. My friend Carla has leapt from the decks of the Titanic and into that same Ark of Fools in about the same time frame. I have other friends who’ve made similar leaps. And on our screening tours, we met folks who, by their own report, made the journey from confusion and bewilderment to clarity, acceptance, and action in a couple of years! Old Marley howled and clanked, their clocks struck midnight, and the spirits did it all in one night! Think of it.

Think of it.

How many such folk walk amongst us unseen? How many are primed and ready, just waiting for Marley’s Ghost to rattle their chains and set them on a quick path from cluelessness to awareness? And what becomes possible, if more of these Scrooges get whacked upside the head with reality? I said a while back that there is great power in not knowing. If I’m going to say such things out loud, then I’m going to have to take them seriously myself, and do such work as is necessary to allow me to hold “not knowing” in my being. And so the answer to these questions is simple: I do not know. Read Peter Russell’s wonderful pieced called A Singularity in Time. We do not know.

Nothing takes the judgment out of me quite so quickly as a good dose of humility.

I have been angry. I have been judgmental and cruel and dismissive. And that has not always served me. While anger can work to focus my energy on that which is outside of me, on that which needs to be faced and confronted and contained or stopped, it’s a tool so easily misused, and so sharp-edged and fierce, that I do well to leave it in the toolbox until I’m sure I can use it without hurting some innocent bystander. Or myself.

There are situations, manipulations, rationalizations, obfuscations and corporations that may all deserve and require that form of focused energy, so it would serve the Earth, for me to master my anger. But it does little good if I spend my anger on those who do not deserve it. At some point I have to learn to make the necessary distinctions between the many degrees of perpetration and victimization. I have to train my eye to see the fine gradations of willfulness, the many grays of blame and complicity that lie on the continuum between the blinding white fire of evil and the cool and soothing black of innocence.

As I do this it becomes very clear: this is delicate work. In the face of such distinctions, where the gradations are so fine, and the shades so subtle, the only way to mastery is to step into bold humility and decisive unknowing. There is simply too much that my meat-bag will never get to know. That’s how it works here at the bottom of the gravity well.

Given that, I may do well most days to hold my judgments and anger with compassionate firmness until clarity comes, if it ever does. While there may be obvious evils that both deserve and need my anger, while there are, in fact, people who need to be stopped and world leaders who need to be run out on a rail and corporations which need to be contained and deconstructed, while there is, as far as I can see, an entire planet-spanning culture that needs to be dismantled and recycled into something life-affirming and sane, most of the other meat-bags around me are just as confused and disoriented as I am. My anger toward them has been the easy way out, little more than “horizontal hostility” toward my fellow stumblers, because it’s so damned scary to contemplate expressing my anger directly to those who may actually deserve it, those with the power to express right back at me.

Are there those who deserve my judgment and anger? Is the CEO of a destructive corporation a bad guy, or just another confused meat-bag trapped in the same culture that trapped me? Or both? Or neither? Do I love the sinner and hate the sin? I don’t know. I’ve been trying to feel my way through that for some time and have yet to find an answer that fully suits me. And I can’t quite decide whether it matters or not. On the one hand, my animal body is clear: whether they are evil or confused, I get, to the best of my abilities, to protect my self and my loved ones from the forces of destruction that threaten us all. The mother bear protects her cubs. That speaks to me with an eloquence and simplicity that feels grounded in the deep rightness of the living world. But then I stop and remember: I’m trying to move beyond the paradigm of domination and control. It may matter, how I regard those forces, even while protecting myself from them. It may matter. I don’t know. For now, I will trust my body. And the mother bear. Protection is not domination and control. My body knows that. My head is too easy to fool.

What’s clear right now is that my anger, at the level of my real life, has served more to stand in my way than to help, and that mastery in the realm of anger is one of my growing edges. My fellow sparks-in-meat-bags need simply for me to hear them and understand them and treat them with compassion as they knock their heads up against the walls of the gravity well, as they meet their own Marleys and are forced to confront the delusions and consequences of their own lives, as they stand on those titanic decks and contemplate the jump before them. As a friend of his emailed Daniel Pinchbeck, which he reports in his wonderful book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl:

I greatly admire your willingness to bear witness to your experiences and beliefs in such a radical and generous way. I will also say that I think the role of truth-bearer requires the purest of intentions. “Do it with love,” is good advice.

Do it with love. Love as a verb, as Juan Santos says. Love as an action in the real world. I can do that. And so I will tell you the hope I saw in that mall. The possibility.

It’s possible for a human being to make huge shifts in his or her worldview in a short amount of time. It’s possible that there are more people on the verge of making such shifts than we can now see or imagine. It’s possible that enough human beings will awaken to the world situation, and to their true nature, that they will be able to bring consciousness and intention to the work of this time, to that process which is already underway, which is to bring an end to a culture, a worldview, a paradigm, now expressing itself as the global industrial machine, which has never been and can never be sustainable on this planet, to bring an end to this culture, to dismantle it and contain it and hold it gently while it breathes its last. It’s possible that this can be done before the mass extinction we are living in plays out to its bitter end. It’s possible that some of us will be able to survive through this process, and thrive our way into a new life on a very different, but still living, planet. It’s possible that we will learn what we have long needed to learn, those of us raised in captivity in this system of disconnection and domination. It’s possible that we will find healing. It’s possible that we will remember ourselves. And it’s possible that we will once again take our places as worthy members of the community of life, and that we will find new ways of being that, echoing Juan Santos, align with our original instructions from the Creator.

The curtains may not be completely torn down, rings and all. Life may prevail. It’s possible. And so I will hold it as such. A possibility. A hope. Held not despite my fellow human beings, but BECAUSE I AM ONE.

Our chances feel slim to none, but it remains possible nonetheless. As Joanna Macy imagines our descendents saying, looking back on this time, “Our ancestors back then, bless them, they had no way of knowing if the Great Turning could succeed. No way of telling if a life-sustaining culture could emerge from the death throes of the industrial growth society. It probably looked hopeless at times. Their efforts must have often seemed isolated, paltry, and darkened by confusion. Yet they went ahead, they kept on doing what they could-and, because they persisted, the Great Turning happened.”

I’ve lived my whole life feeling like I’m not from here. Perhaps you have as well. And there may be some truth to that, at some level of reality. But I find that it just doesn’t matter any more. Whether I’m from here or not, I’m here now. Here is where my work is to be done: here in the gravity well we call Earth, with these other poor, crazy souls stumbling about around me. I have lost too much time to my judgments, trying vainly to protect myself, “warning all human sympathy to keep its distance,” even reveling in that. Perhaps it’s time to give that up?

Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.

And so, says a not-so-tiny Tim, to my fellow bipedal-meat-bags, to our brothers in four legs and six legs and more, to our sisters in wing and fin and leaf and mycelium, to our compatriots in stone and wind and water and fire, to our allies and teachers, our ancestors and descendants, our guides and our shadows, our drop-ins our changelings and our arrogant assholes, to all of you I say this, as poor and crippled as I am:

God bless us, every one.

*****

Tim Bennett is a writer, filmmaker and meat bag currently looking for the instruction manual in the Southeast US. You can read his blog and get in touch with him, maybe, at his website www.whatawaytogomovie.com.

I want to go on record, here and now, and state, publicly and beforehand, that I am certain that on 12/21/12, something is going to happen. I don’t know what, precisely, but with 7,059,353,061 people on the planet, something’s gotta happen, right? Well, I’m predicting it. So there. You can take that to the bank. Just don’t expect much of an interest rate.

While I feel a bit playful regarding the whole Mayan Calendar thing, I don’t much feel like scoffing. The notion that this date in history would see some “event” - due to a galactic alignment, the end of an astrological age, a collision with Nibiru, the reaching of the singularity, or the crossing of a “galactic synchronization beam” or the “Dark Rift” or “Xibalba be” - and that the Maya, or the Olmecs, with help from either psychedelics, gods, or aliens, could precisely measure and predict this event, has never made much sense at all to my mind, as that mind has been formed and trained inside of the scientific materialistic paradigm. I see arbitrary definitions and unsupportable claims to precision, disinformation, confusion, and obfuscation, divided opinions about what is known and what is not, and a great deal of picking and choosing. I see a host of competing and incompatible assumptions, expectations, analyses, and predictions. I see cravings for collapse and transcendence, deep streams of individual and collective pain and fear and guilt and exhaustion, and swelling tides of hopefulness and longing and need and want. But I don’t see much that convinces me that, on the physical level, this date means much of anything, beyond it being the date of the annual winter solstice.

But of course I don’t confine myself solely to that-there materialist paradigm. I regard scientific materialism as an extremely useful facet through which to view reality, but limited and/or incomplete. And so while I see little “scientific” reason to expect something of galactic significance happening on 12/21, I see no need to dismiss the entire phenomenon out of hand as nothing but silliness. In the first place, I’ve encountered, over the years, many tantalizing bits of evidence and analysis that seem to point to the notion that ancient cultures developed or acquired the Long Count calendar and went to great lengths to use it for something, to tell us something, to pass down some knowledge which they felt was important. There may be long-cycle factors of which we are not aware. There may be message from the past, or from “the other.” There may be, splashing about in that gray and choppy bathwater known as “the 2012 phenomenon,” a baby worth saving.

Beyond that, there are three other forces I see at work that could result in “something happening.” First, were I a member of the hidden human elite global control layers popularly referred to as “they,” I would surely be voting for a 12/21 roll-out date for some new initiative, whether that be a false flag operation designed to tighten control or distract the rubes, or another controlled demolition of the current system meant to achieve whatever “double secret” goals “they” have. Since I tend to think such layers actually exist, I, for one, shall not be at all surprised to see some rather dramatic event unfold on 12/21. Second, were I a crewman on one of them-there UFOs, helping enact some hidden, enigmatic, long-term “plan,” I’d be looking at 12/21 as a wonderfully theatrical date for yet another act in the Great Cosmic Comedy known by many as “the alien agenda.” Since I tend to think that there’s some measure of truthiness to such things, I am not inclined to rule out the possibility of “something big” coming down from the skies (or up from the underground lodges) to add to the spectacle. I expect neither salvation nor invasion, but I also expect to be surprised by whatever unfolds, including the possibility that what unfolds is absolutely nothing at all that we can nail down. Third, as someone who resonates strongly with the “holographic universe” idea, I see the possibility that the combined attention, intention, focus, wishin’, and hopin’ of millions of people, (including stork people and elm people and mosquito people and squid people and copper people) the chorus of belief sung by many more than a hundred monkeys, can itself “cause” events to unfold in the physical realm. I think this shit is somehow more Real™ than scientific materialism acknowledges, that the physical realm is more plastic and malleable than our consensus beliefs usually allow. Perhaps if hundreds of millions of us all go stand on the same side of the collective psychic boat, the dang thing’ll flip over. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Mostly I watch the whole 2012 thing in terms of what it tells us about ourselves, we Civilized™, apocalypse-loving folk, about what we sense in our world with our intuitive, sensitized animal bodies, about what we fear is rushing at us as the oil wells sputter and the climate goes whack and the economy falls to its knees, about the hopelessness and helplessness and out-of-controllness and resignation most people feel in the face of it all, about our wish for freedom and peace and reconnection and justice and a return to human sanity, about our longing for the return of magic and spirit, and our belief in what it will take to knock ourselves from our current system and free our hearts, minds, and souls from the shackles of the madness of assumption, expectation, belief and habit we call “normal.” It may be that most people don’t really believe that there’s much Scientific™ reality to this 2012 phenomenon. But we pay attention anyways, and think about it, and wonder, and joke, and maybe even hope a little. Why the hell not? We’re like the older kids in the line to see Santa, like non-believers whispering deathbed prayers. We’ve got our doubts, for sure, but… what harm, eh? Who knows? And why not? Cover the bases, just in case. And knock on wood.

Our local cafe is hosting an end-of-the-year party on Friday night, and a survivor’s brunch the following morning. I expect both events to go off without a hitch. But who knows? Something is going to happen on 12/21. Somewhere. I’ve already predicted it. Maybe they’ll run out of hollandaise sauce. Maybe the wind will knock down a pole and the power will go out all over the island. Or maybe something truly astounding or horrible or transformative will happen somewhere on planet Earth that will thrust us off our current worldline and toward something else we do not now expect. I’m open to the possibility. And I don’t feel like I have anything to lose by staying that way.

I’ll see you all on the other side. Hold onto your hats. Love the ones you’re with. And make sure you have a buddy. Drink plenty of water, and always have a litter bag in your car. Beyond that, you’re on your own. You know what to do.

Pax,
T

Warning: Beyond Here Be Scoffing!

Sometimes a Man - Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

Hello All,

I hope this letter finds you well and engaged in your lives, as is Sally, and as am I. It’s that holiday time of the year, of course, and I find myself thinking about home and family, as the culture has taught me to do. I won’t be seeing any of you this year … again … and it seems right, to reflect on that for a bit, and see what peace such reflection might give me. I find it ironic in the extreme that I, a confirmed Scrooge-o-phile, has ended up saying to you “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” But there it is. And the fact is, these days, ol’ Scrooge’s nephew was quite correct: from the perspective of most people in our culture, I don’t keep it at all.

What is there to say, really? I spent the last dozen years and more, as Daniel Quinn advises and Colie Brice sings, “walking away.” I walked away from the culture into which I was born, the culture that was transmitted to me via my family, my school, my friends, by the various media that comprised the water in which I swam. I walked away, and continue to walk away, from the stories, the expectations, the beliefs, and the assumptions. I have walked away, as much as has felt sensible and meaningful, from the outward manifestations of those expectations and assumptions, slowly refashioning my relationships to work, play, food, consumption, body, exercise, time, space, love, partnership, and feeling. I have walked so far, so many standard deviations from the mean, so close to the edge, that some days I wonder if I might not just reach up and pull myself off this planet entirely, like the Little Prince and his flock of “wild birds,” and begin my journey back “home” to Asteroid B-612. I have, indeed, gone looking for that church in the East.

I hope you understand that I had to do this, that I was dying “inside the dishes and in the glasses.” Or, even if it makes no sense to you, I hope you might trust that it makes sense to me. I tried for so long to find a way to fit in, to find my way inside of the stories that had raised me up. But I couldn’t. The news of our quickly-changing world and our bankrupt cultural expectations knocked me down and broke me open and I have never been the same. What crawled out of that broken shell, that rusted suit of armor, that torn, papery, cocoon, has become, over time, the person I consider the “real me.”

Hello…

Whether moth or wanderer, I’m glad, finally, to have stepped more fully into the human body I now wear and the person I “be.” I have work to do still, of course. This fleshsuit fits imperfectly, and there are parts of it I can’t quite make work the way I want to. But by and large, stepping into who I am has been a prize worth my fighting for. I have never felt happier. But what a cost in loss and pain. I am so sorry that my journey has taken me so far afield from those who first nurtured me. And I am so sorry that walking away has been so difficult for us all, and that I left you with little to do but say blessings on me as if I were dead. I could not find another way to get where I am, but to leave where I was.

I have few points of contact with the holidays now. Though I find truths worth considering in the nativity story, I am not a Christian, and so do not much connect with the holiday in that way. Though I enjoy the ancient shamanic roots of the modern Santa story, there is little in that whole mythology that calls to me now, David Sedaris notwithstanding. And even the whole ritual of gift giving and receiving leaves me vaguely embarrassed, as it feels to me such a pale substitute for what it is I really want, which is close, intimate, vulnerable exchanges of life and love and aid and support with people with whom I can “belong,” rather than just “fit in,” to use Brene Brown’s words. So when I encounter the outer signs of the holiday season, be they decorations, parties, or people asking me whether I’ve “finished my shopping,” I am struck mostly with a sense of the surreal and a pang of nostalgia, as I am reminded that this world in which I once lived and participated is still going on all around me. I feel like a ghost, who walks a world out of which he has died away. Or a time traveler, who steps, momentarily, into his own past. The feeling is awkward, painful, dissonant, disturbing, distressing. I no longer belong there. It is time for this ghost to move on.

So it is very hard on me, to “come back,” even for short visits. The stories and assumptions and expectations in which I was raised are, from what I can see, still largely intact in my family of origin. Family stories about what we value, and how we interact, and who takes which role, expectations about what is allowable to do, to say, to want, to need, and to have, assumptions about conflict and vulnerability and acceptance and relationship and intimacy, these are the very “dishes” and “glasses” in which I was dying. I do not now fit into those stories, and am unconvinced that, on my own, I can find a way to find my peace with them. I know you to be good people doing the best with what you have, as are we all. It’s the stories you live from that can hurt me. It’s as if, so close to the edge, so ready to take off into the cosmos with my flock of birds, I now breathe air that would not sustain most of you, or you breathe air that stifles and strangles me. It feels that elemental to me. That difficult to overcome. That painful. And so, once again, I stay away, not knowing what else to do. There remain unresolved conflicts, and many painful wounds, and I am unable to heal them myself.

And yet I quite like the cold and snow and the dark of the year. I love the strands of twinkling lights. I love some of the old holiday music. And there are movies that Sally and I watch every year, movies like Love Actually and The Family Stone and Pieces of April, movies that touch, if only briefly, the family bonds we see as possible, the holidays as we might create them, and the sorts of connections we do find amongst that smaller tribe of fellow edge-people and asteroid-dwellers and shrews and mutants we know mostly from a distance. I’ve got lights strung in my office. Jethro Tull’s Christmas Song awaits the touch of a button. And soon we’ll dig out those old movies and watch them and cry and wish and dream and long. But mostly, this year, I think I shall just be thankful for what I did have then, rather than grieving for what I do not have now.

I want you to know two things. As painful as walking away has been, I would do it all again, because my life is exactly what I want and need it to be right now. I am well, out here on the edge. Well and truly and amen. I’m doing great, even as tears stream down my face. And I want you to know that, because I am okay now, I know that I need nothing from you. I do not need you to follow me. I do not need you to look at what I look at, think what I think, feel what I feel, believe what I believe, or know what I know. I do not need you to do anything, to “transition to a sustainable lifestyle,” to “save the world,” to “walk a spiritual path,” to “question your assumptions,” to live your lives in any way but the way you are called to live them, or to “keep Christmas” in any way but which brings you the joy and peace you wish to have for yourselves. If anything I’ve said or done over the years has communicated otherwise, please understand that I was merely trying to claim my own right to follow my own path. I have found my “church in the East.” I trust that you shall all find your own churches, in your own ways, and in your own times. This seems the design of things, to me. And that, even if there is pain and loss, makes it feel right and good.

Please, as you all gather this year, wherever and however and with whomever that happens to be, know that, from afar, I remember you all, and wish you the best. Know that I carry a deep appreciation for what you’ve all given me, from the nurturing I received as a child to the gifts of wisdom that even our separation now has to teach me. Please know that I know that you are good-hearted people who want the best for each other and for me. And please know that, even as you say blessings on me as if I were dead, I am not dead, any more than the Little Prince is dead. The Little Prince laughs still amongst the stars, and I am still here, still walking my path along the edge of the gravity well. And I’m quite a good fellow, actually, with much to offer, and gifts to give, and love to share. Should any of your own paths bring you this way, and should you wish to step into a house built on stories and expectations very different from your own, and should you care to taste the strange, brisk air I seem so much to adore, please know that I will welcome you in for tea. I’ll give you a tour of the church I found. You can feed the flock of wild birds. We’ll listen to some Jethro Tull and some David Sedaris. Probably we’ll cry.

That’s the way we do things here on the edge.

That’s how I walk through this dark of the year.

May the gods bless us, every one.

Pax.
T

Today outside your prison I stand

and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;

you have relatives outside. And there are

thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago I bent my skill to keep my

cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies,

and shouted my plans to jailers;

but always new plans occured to me,

or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,

or some stupid jailer would forget

and leave the keys.

Inside, I dreamed of constellations—

those feeding creatures outlined by stars,

their skeletons a darkness between jewels,

heroes that exist only where they are not.

Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,

just as—often, in light, on the open hills—

you can pass an antelope and not know

and look back, and then—even before you see—

there is something wrong about the grass.

And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting.

Now—these few more words, and then I’m

gone: Tell everyone just to remember

their names, and remind others, later, when we

find each other. Tell the little ones

to cry and then go to sleep, curled up

where they can. And if any of us get lost,

if any of us cannot come all the way—

remember: there will come a time when

all we have said and all we have hoped

will be all right.

There will be that form in the grass.

William Stafford, A Message From the Wanderer

A recent Facebook thread on slavery, both of the “chattel and chains” variety and the more modern “wage slave” or “cultural captive” kind, has me pondering how the word “captivity” so well describes my own experience of life on this planet, and serves as a good metaphor for my view of reality.

What if “the game” for me here, as a deep-sea diver of the physical realm, is one of finding my “captivity” at every level so that I can then find my “freedom”? Whether it’s the stories of my family, the confining beliefs of the culture in which I was born and raised, my own ego structures (the family and cultural stories internalized), the seeming “realities” of needing money, jobs, homes, etc, the various dysfunctional, and even insane, systems which purport to “govern our lives” and which comprise this thing we call “civilization,” the current and coming unraveling of these various systems as the larger “realities” of physical laws and limits come back to bite us on the ass, or the even larger and more fundamental “realities” of Reality™ itself, it feels possible to get trapped and held captive in any and all of these levels of “the game.” And much of what I have been up to these past decades, the game I have been playing, is to learn to see the traps, the chains, the cages, so that I can step out of them into some sort of freedom.

This can feel like hard work. And though it feels off to say that, (as, to my mind, even the story that “it’s hard work” can be a prison) it feels important nonetheless to recognize that such psychological forces as “learned helplessness,” “cultural indoctrination,” “emotional and psychological wounding,” “golden handcuffs,” and “the Stockholm Syndrome” are in operation here, working inside of us humans to keep us in our cells. Once I learned that the lock on the cell door is largely one I put there myself (or at least accepted as necessary at the time), finding freedom has come more and more easily. In many cases, it involves simply re-writing a story that I’ve been telling myself.

It feels, to me, like the most essential part of finding freedom is seeing and coming into full acceptance of “what is.” When I spend my energy fighting “what is” with such stories as “this should not be” and “this is not fair” and “this is wrong,” when I do not allow myself to simply come to full acceptance of “what is,” I stay stuck. My energies are distracted. I might find some distance between my “self” and “the problem.” I might convert my self-blame to other-blame. But I never quite find the freedom I am looking for. Because, I think, I am unclear of my goal. The notion of “freedom” immediately raises the question “freedom from what?” I have to know what the “what” is first, before I can “get anywhere.”

All of which explains my life-long quest to see “what is,” whether that be the collapse of civilization, the truth of various “fringe” issues, the effects my family of origin had on my psyche, etc. The more clarity I’ve gained, the more freedom I’ve found. As Brother Ryan said in that Facebook thread, “to see the farm is to leave it.” That’s how it has worked for me.

But the manner of “leaving it” is shaped by the nature of the “farm” itself, I think. Many folks step in, at this point, and argue that, well, that’s all fine and good, Mr. Smarty Pants Pure Research Man, but you’re a Privileged White American Male™. You’ve got options for “leaving the farm” that most do not. And, on top of that, we’re now all standing on the decks of a sinking ship. We’re all riding together on a big ol’ jet airliner that’s plummeting toward the ground. We’re all trapped in a cultural gulag. Climate change is for everybody! The Collapse of the Global Industrial Economy is for everybody! Slavery is for everybody, slaves and slaveholders alike. It’s all “the farm” now. There is no leaving it.

There are facets through which I can view reality in which these are true™ statements. There are facets in which these statements, and their opposites, collapse into one. And yet there are places I can stand, I have found, in which these statements simply describe the nature of whatever captivity, whatever game, I find myself in. And since, as an Otter of the Universe, I try to honor the “dive fully into physical experience” aspect of existence, I need such a place to stand. And it’s there that the “full acceptance” piece comes in. Okay. I’m on a plane that’s going down. The ground is rushing up to greet me with its hard embrace. There is “no way out.” And yet, even then, I can panic and scream, I can storm the cockpit and try to “take control,” I can lash out in anger at the stewardess, or I can turn to the person next to me and say, simply, “I love you very, very much.”

There is always some freedom to be found, I find, even here at “the bottom of the gravity well.” Freedom inside of whatever situation I find myself. Freedom from myself. It’s up to me, I say, “just to remember my name,” as Mr. Stafford says. The key question here, which I posed early on, is “what if…?” For myself, when I step into this metaphor/reality of slaves and prisons and farms and escape, I find far more personal power than when I do not. So I do…

“To see the farm is to leave it.”

In my experience, Ryan Johnson is right.